Category Archives: Managing People

Mukesh and Anil joined a company together a few months after their graduation from university.

After a few years of work, their Manager promoted Mukesh to a position of Senior Sales Manager, but Anil remained in his entry level Junior Sales Officer position.

Anil developed a sense of jealousy and disgruntlement, but continued working anyway.

One day Anil felt that he could not work with Mukesh anymore. He wrote his resignation letter, but before he submitted it to the Manager, he complained that Management did not value hard working staff, but only promoted the favoured one!

The Manager knew that Anil worked very hard for the years he had spent at the company; even harder than Mukesh and therefore he deserved the promotion. So in order to help Anil to realize this, the Manager gave Anil a task.

“Go and find out if anyone is selling water melons in town?”

Anil returned and said, “yes there is someone!”

The Manager asked, “how much per kg?” Anil drove back to town to ask and then returned to inform the Manager; “they are Rs 13.50 per kg!”

The Manager told Anil, “I will give Mukesh the same task that I gave you.”

So the Manager said to Mukesh, in the presence of Anil; “Go and find out if anyone is selling water melons in town?”

Mukesh went to find out and on his return he said:

“Manager, there is only one person selling water melons in the whole town. The cost is Rs 49.00 each water melon and Rs 32.50 for a half melon. He sells them at Rs 13.50 per kg when sliced. He has in his stock 93 melons, each one weighing about 7kg.

He has a farm and can supply us with melons for the next 4 months at a rate of 102 melons per day at Rs 27.00 per melon; this includes delivery.

The melons appear fresh and red with good quality, and they taste better than the ones we sold last year.

He has his own slicing machine and is willing to slice for us free of charge.

We need to strike a deal with him before 10 a.m. tomorrow and we will be sure of beating last year’s profits in melons by Rs 223. This will contribute positively to our overall performance as it will add a minimum of 3.78% to our current overall sales target.

I have put this information down in writing and is available on spreadsheet.

Please let me know if you need it as I can send it to you in fifteen minutes.”

Anil was very impressed and realized the difference between himself and Mukesh. He decided not to resign but to learn from Mukesh.

Let this story help us keep in mind the importance of going an extra mile in all our endeavours.

You won’t be rewarded for doing what you’re meant to do, you only get a salary for that! You’re only rewarded for going an extra mile; performing beyond expectations.

To be successful in life you must be observant, proactive and willing to do more, think more, have a more holistic perspective and go beyond the call of duty…

Like this:

Several years ago we came up with a great idea for a new leadership-development offering we thought would be valuable to everyone. We had research demonstrating that when people embarked on a self-development program, their success increased dramatically when they received follow-up encouragement. We developed a software application to offer that sort of encouragement. People could enter their development goals, and the software would send them reminders every week or month asking how they were doing, to motivate them to keep on going. We invested a lot of time and money in this product.

But it turned out that people did not like receiving the e-mails and found them more annoying than motivating. Some of our users came up with a name for this type of software. They called it “nagware.” Needless to say, this product never reached the potential we had envisioned. Thinking about the decisions we had made to create this disappointing result led us to ask the question, “What causes well-meaning people to make poor decisions?”

Some possibilities came immediately to mind – people make poor decisions when under severe time pressure or when they don’t have access to all the important information (unless they are explaining the decision to their boss, and then it is often someone else’s fault).

But we wanted a more objective answer. In an effort to understand the root cause of poor decision making, we looked at 360-feedback data from more than 50,000 leaders and compared the behavior of those who were perceived to be making poor decisions with that of the people perceived to be making very good decisions. We did a factor analysis of the behaviors that made the most statistical difference between the best and worst decision makers. Nine factors emerged as the most common paths to poor decision making. Here they are in order from most to least significant.

1. Laziness.
This showed up as a failure to check facts, to take the initiative, to confirm assumptions, or to gather additional input. Basically, such people were perceived to be sloppy in their work and unwilling to put themselves out. They relied on past experience and expected results simply to be an extrapolation of the past.

2. Not anticipating unexpected events.
It is discouraging to consistently consider the possibility of negative events in our lives, and so most people assume the worst will not happen. Unfortunately, bad things happen fairly often. People die, get divorced, and have accidents. Markets crash, house prices go down, and friends are unreliable. There is excellent research demonstrating that if people just take the time to consider what might go wrong, they are actually very good at anticipating problems. But many people just get so excited about a decision they are making that they never take the time to do that simple due-diligence.

3. Indecisiveness.
At the other end of the scale, when faced with a complex decision that will be based on constantly changing data, it’s easy to continue to study the data, ask for one more report, or perform yet one more analysis before a decision gets made. When the reports and the analysis take much longer than expected, poor decision makers delay, and the opportunity is missed. It takes courage to look at the data, consider the consequences responsibly, and then move forward. Oftentimes indecision is worse than making the wrong decision. Those most paralyzed by fear are the ones who believe that one mistake will ruin their careers and so avoid any risk at all.

4. Remaining locked in the past.
Some people make poor decisions because they’re using the same old data or processes they always have. Such people get used to approaches that worked in the past and tend not to look for approaches that will work better. Better the devil they know. But, too often, when a decision is destined to go wrong, it’s because the old process is based on assumptions that are no longer true. Poor decision makers fail to keep those base assumptions in mind when applying the tried and true.

5. Having no strategic alignment.
Bad decisions sometimes stem from a failure to connect the problem to the overall strategy. In the absence of a clear strategy that provides context, many solutions appear to make sense. When tightly linked to a clear strategy, the better solutions quickly begin to rise to the top.

6. Over-dependence.
Some decisions are never made because one person is waiting for another, who in turn is waiting for someone else’s decision or input. Effective decision makers find a way to act independently when necessary.

7. Isolation.
Some of those leaders are waiting for input because they’ve not taken steps to get it in a timely manner or have not established the relationships that would enable them to draw on other people’s expertise when they need to. All our research (and many others’) on effective decision making recognizes that involving others with the relevant knowledge, experience, and expertise improves the quality of the decision. This is not news. So the question is why. Sometimes people lack the necessary networking skills to access the right information. Other times, we’ve found, people do not involve others because they want the credit for a decision. Unfortunately they get to take the blame for the bad decisions, as well.

8. Lack of technical depth.
Organizations today are very complex, and even the best leaders do not have enough technical depth to fully understand multifaceted issues. But when decision makers rely on others’ knowledge and expertise without any perspective of their own, they have a difficult time integrating that information to make effective decisions. And when they lack even basic knowledge and expertise, they have no way to tell if a decision is brilliant or terrible. We continue to find that the best executives have deep expertise. And when they still don’t have the technical depth to understand the implications of the decisions they face, they make it their business to find the talent they need to help them.

9. Failure to communicate the what, where, when, and how associated with their decisions.
Some good decisions become bad decisions because people don’t understand – or even know about — them. Communicating a decision, its rational and implications, is critical to the successful implementation of a decision.

Waiting too long for others’ input. Failing to get the right input at the right time. Failing to understand that input through insufficient skills. Failing to understand when something that worked in the past will not work now. Failing to know when to make a decision without all the right information and when to wait for more advice. It’s no wonder good people make bad decisions. The path to good decision making is narrow, and it’s far from straight. But keeping in mind the pitfalls can make any leader a more effective decision maker.